Capacity as Aggregation: Promises, Water and a Form of Collective Care in Northeast Brazil

As the twenty-first century gets underway, people have been experimenting with many forms of political organization. In Northeast Brazil, that experimental spirit led to the creation of the Water Pact, a process involving more than eight thousand participants through a series of public promise-making rituals in which they made pledges to care for water, attending to the specificities of their own context. The Pact gathered those promises into a multi-scalar formation that, the organizers believed, would yield the necessary resources to address the state’s water problems. The Pact would break with an unsuccessful history of infrastructural and legal reforms concerning deep-water access in the state of Ceará. This article examines how that collective was produced, what its constituent units were and how the logic of aggregation guided practices leading to its coalescence. My purpose is to re-examine the aggregate as a quantitative form of capacity that should be qualitatively reconsidered

A Future History of Water

Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses

What Is in a Percentage?: Calculation as the Poetic Translation of Human Rights

Increasingly, the efficacy of human rights, international norms, and commercial standards is deposited in numbers as measures of social and financial value. Taking the form of indicators, goals, and targets, these numbers are active participants in the everyday practices through which the law is constituted around the world. This paper examines the normative ability of percentages as numeric devices that transform measures of value across legal domains. The paper draws on two examples: a) the generation of indicators by NGOs promoting the Human Right to Water, and b) the technical work of regulators attempting to regulate water prices to follow the 3% affordability target that the United Nations advocates for. I argue that the process of translating human rights into numbers bestows rights with an afterlife that expands their reach into new domains. I also suggest that such process of translation is poetic and that exploring numbers and their role in lawmaking from a poetic point of view reveals the rich social lives that numbers lead. Attending more carefully to these numbers also shows the political possibilities that translation processes across genres of communication afford a philosophy of human rights preoccupied not only with their violation, but also with their implementation. Regulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields, Symposium, May 16-18, 2013, Istanbul, Turke

What Is in a Percentage?: Calculation as the Poetic Translation of Human Rights

Increasingly, the efficacy of human rights, international norms, and commercial standards is deposited in numbers as measures of social and financial value. Taking the form of indicators, goals, and targets, these numbers are active participants in the everyday practices through which the law is constituted around the world. This paper examines the normative ability of percentages as numeric devices that transform measures of value across legal domains. The paper draws on two examples: a) the generation of indicators by NGOs promoting the Human Right to Water, and b) the technical work of regulators attempting to regulate water prices to follow the 3% affordability target that the United Nations advocates for. I argue that the process of translating human rights into numbers bestows rights with an afterlife that expands their reach into new domains. I also suggest that such process of translation is poetic and that exploring numbers and their role in lawmaking from a poetic point of view reveals the rich social lives that numbers lead. Attending more carefully to these numbers also shows the political possibilities that translation processes across genres of communication afford a philosophy of human rights preoccupied not only with their violation, but also with their implementation. Regulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields, Symposium, May 16-18, 2013, Istanbul, Turke

Regulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields (Symposium Introduction)

Regulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields, Symposium, May 16-18, 2013, Istanbul, Turke

Short-term synaptic plasticity regulates the level of olivocochlear inhibition to auditory hair cells

In the mammalian inner ear, the gain control of auditory inputs is exerted by medial olivocochlear (MOC) neurons that innervate cochlear outer hair cells (OHCs). OHCs mechanically amplify the incoming sound waves by virtue of their electromotile properties while the MOC system reduces the gain of auditory inputs by inhibiting OHC function. How this process is orchestrated at the synaptic level remains unknown. In the present study, MOC firing was evoked by electrical stimulation in an isolated mouse cochlear preparation, while OHCs postsynaptic responses were monitored by whole-cell recordings. These recordings confirmed that electrically evoked IPSCs (eIPSCs) are mediated solely by α9β10 nAChRs functionally coupled to calcium-activated SK2 channels. Synaptic release occurred with low probability when MOC-OHC synapses were stimulated at 1 Hz. However, as the stimulation frequency was raised, the reliability of release increased due to presynaptic facilitation. In addition, the relatively slow decay of eIPSCs gave rise to temporal summation at stimulation frequencies >10 Hz. The combined effect of facilitation and summation resulted in a frequency-dependent increase in the average amplitude of inhibitory currents in OHCs. Thus, we have demonstrated that short-term plasticity is responsible for shaping MOC inhibition and, therefore, encodes the transfer function from efferent firing frequency to the gain of the cochlear amplifier.Fil: Ballestero, Jimena Andrea. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Zorrilla de San Martín, Javier. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Goutman, Juan Diego. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Elgoyhen, Ana Belen. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina; ArgentinaFil: Fuchs, Paul A.. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Estados UnidosFil: Katz, Eleonora. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Celular; Argentin

A point mutation in the hair cell nicotinic cholinergic receptor prolongs cochlear inhibition and enhances noise protection

The transduction of sound in the auditory periphery, the cochlea, is inhibited by efferent cholinergic neurons projecting from the brainstem and synapsing directly on mechanosensory hair cells. One fundamental question in auditory neuroscience is what role(s) this feedback plays in our ability to hear. In the present study, we have engineered a genetically modified mouse model in which the magnitude and duration of efferent cholinergic effects are increased, and we assess the consequences of this manipulation on cochlear function. We generated the Chrna9L9′T of knockin mice with a threonine for leucine change (L9′T) at position 9′ of the second transmembrane domain of the α9 nicotinic cholinergic subunit, rendering α9-containing receptors that were hypersensitive to acetylcholine and had slower desensitization kinetics. The Chrna9L9′T allele produced a 3-fold prolongation of efferent synaptic currents in vitro. In vivo, Chrna9L9′T mice had baseline elevation of cochlear thresholds and efferent-mediated inhibition of cochlear responses was dramatically enhanced and lengthened: both effects were reversed by strychnine blockade of the α9α10 hair cell nicotinic receptor. Importantly, relative to their wild-type littermates, Chrna9L9′T/L9′T mice showed less permanent hearing loss following exposure to intense noise. Thus, a point mutation designed to alter α9α10 receptor gating has provided an animal model in which not only is efferent inhibition more powerful, but also one in which sound-induced hearing loss can be restrained, indicating the ability of efferent feedback to ameliorate sound trauma.Fil: Taranda, Julian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; Argentina. Tufts University School of Medicine; Estados UnidosFil: Maison, Stéphane F.. Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary; Estados UnidosFil: Ballestero, Jimena Andrea. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Katz, Eleonora. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Savino, Jessica. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Vetter, Douglas E.. Tufts University School of Medicine; Estados UnidosFil: Boulter, Jim. University of California at Los Angeles; Estados UnidosFil: Liberman, M. Charles. Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary; Estados UnidosFil: Fuchs, Paul A.. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Estados UnidosFil: Elgoyhen, Ana Belen. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Departamento de Farmacología; Argentin

Las formaciones geológicas sudamericanas en los viajes de Charles Darwin y Alcide d`Orbigny : Mapas geológicos, fósiles e itinerarios

Fil: Podgorny, Irina. Archivo Histórico; Museo de La Plata. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Ballestero, Diego Alberto. Archivo Histórico. Museo de La Plata. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Farro, Máximo Ezequiel. Archivo Histórico. Museo de La Plata. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: García, Susana Valeria. Archivo Histórico. Museo de La Plata. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Pegoraro, Andrea. Archivo Histórico. Museo de La Plata. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Pupio, Alejandra. Departamento de Humanidades. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Bahía Blanca; ArgentinaFil: Reguero, Marcelo Alfredo. División Paleontología Vertebrados. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Zárate, Marcelo. Centro de Geología de Costas y Cuaternario. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Mar del Plata; Argentin

Caracterización de las exacerbaciones de enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica en el servicio de Urgencias de Hospital Universitario Miguel Servet

ntroducción. La enfermedad pulmonar obstructiva crónica (EPOC), es una enfermedad respiratoria que produce una obstrucción persistente al flujo aéreo. Se manifiesta con síntomas crónicos respiratorios como la disnea, la tos, que se puede presentar con o sin producción de esputo, la limitación al ejercicio y con exacerbaciones definidas como empeoramiento agudo de los síntomas respiratorios que resulta en un tratamiento adicional. La EPOC es la enfermedad respiratoria crónica más prevalente en todo el mundo, se sitúa entre las principales causas de muerte en todo el mundo y se asocia con una importante carga sanitaria y económica al ser uno de los tres motivos más frecuentes de consulta de enfermedades crónicas atendidas en atención primaria. El diagnostico se establece mediante espirometría forzada y el tratamiento se basa en control de la sintomatología ya que no existe cura. Recientemente, se propuso la clasificación de Roma en la que se integraron variables objetivas y fácilmente medibles para marcar la gravedad de las exacerbaciones de la EPOC.Material y métodos. En este trabajo se realiza un estudio descriptivo del manejo de las exacerbaciones en un hospital general, mediante el análisis de los datos de 100 historias clínicas. Se ha incluido población que tras ser atendidos en la urgencia del hospital Miguel Servet se etiquetaba con el diagnostico de exacerbación de EPOC. Los datos se estratificaron por las diferentes clases de gravedad y se compararon con respecto a las características generales de la enfermedad y los parámetros clínicos.Resultados. Según esta propuesta, 46 pacientes presentaban una EPOC leve, 36 moderada y 18 grave. La mortalidad hospitalaria en eventos leves, moderados y graves fue del 4,3%, 0% y 5,5%, respectivamente. La mayoría de los parámetros clínicos indicaron un estado significativamente peor en los pacientes clasificados en el grupo grave, en comparación con los del grupo leve o moderado. El manejo de las exacerbaciones de EPOC no se adecua a las necesidades clínicas del paciente y destaca una alta prevalencia de ingreso hospitalario para el manejo de las exacerbaciones.Conclusiones. Los resultados de este estudio brindan información sobre la heterogeneidad de la EPOC hospitalaria y muestran que los criterios de Roma recientemente propuestos pueden diferenciar entre la gravedad de la exacerbación y con ello decidir un manejo terapéutico adecuado. Es necesario realizar un algoritmo con el fin de estandarizar el tratamiento de las exacerbaciones de la EPOC y adaptar el tratamiento a la gravedad de la exacerbación.<br /

Clinical and demographic factors in endometrial and ovary carcinoma: Synchronous carcinoma vs stage IIIA endometrial carcinoma

Objective: To compare pre-surgical demographic and clinical factors and preoperative serum tumor marker values of patients with endometrial and ovarian synchronous carcinoma with those diagnosed with endometrial carcinoma with metastatic ovarian involvement (FIGO stage IIIA). Methods: A retrospective observational study including patients with endometrial and ovarian malignant tumors that were treated at Miguel Servet University Hospital, Zaragoza, Spain, since January 2000 to June 2020. All pathologic specimens were reviewed by two pathologists specialized in gynecological oncology. Results: Overall, 51 patients were included. 24 cases of them, were endometrial and ovarian synchronous primary carcinomas and the remaining 27 cases were endometrial tumors with adnexa. Parity, personal and family oncological history, arterial hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, obesity and the prior use of hormone replacement therapy did not show significant differences between both groups. Age (p = 0.002), menopausal status (p = 0.029), abnormal uterine bleeding (p = 0.001), Ca 12.5 preoperative serum level (p = 0.038) and Ca 19.9 preoperative serum level (0.028) were factors with significant differences between both groups. In multivariate analysis, only abnormal uterine bleeding and Ca 19.9 values were independents factors. Conclusions: The presence of abnormal uterine bleeding and Ca 19.9 preoperative serum level could guide the clinician in the preoperative differential diagnosis between endometrial cancer with ovarian involvement and endometrial and ovarian synchronous carcinoma. © 2021 The Author(s)